20 August 2016

20th of August

Farm statusIntel GPUs
Half running Seti and the other half running both CPDN and Seti

Nvidia GPUs
Two off at the shop

Raspberry Pis
All running Einstein BRP4 work

Farm updates
The two new dedicated GPU crunchers are in the shop. They are going from a Fractal Designs ARC Mini (mATX) case to an ARC Midi (ATX) case. That should allow me to use the bottom PCIe slot in them without hitting the power supply. I looked at getting the Asus Z170 Pro motherboard but only the gaming version seems to be available so I took the cheaper option and went with moving the existing mATX motherboards into a bigger case.

While dropping the two GPU crunchers off at the shop this morning I picked up the remaining i7-6700 which has now been setup. Its running a bit of each project to get some numbers up. I will switch it over to Seti once it finishes off its Einstein work. This brings the Intel GPU part of the cluster up to 8 machines.

While this is going on there are a bunch of updates for the Raspberry Pi's so I am backing them up and then updating. The updates don't take too long but backing up the SD card takes a while.

Future upgrades
As I mentioned in my last post I am awaiting some movement in the GPU crunching space and for AMD to see what they've got available, A couple of interesting messages threads I've been reading lately regarding a 40 core CPU cruncher using dual Xeon v4 processors. It looks like it could be a replacement for my two i7-5860K machines. All I can do at the moment is wait.

One thing I am looking at doing is replacing the disks in the various crunchers. Some of them have an Intel SSD plus a hard disk and the remainder have hard disks of varying sizes. I prefer to have things standardised. The hard disks that went into the dedicated GPU crunchers are 320Gb drives manufactured in 2008 that I have reused from previous machines. They work fine but are rather slow.